My Portuguese is advancing nicely and I have been wanting to learn a new language. I toyed with Japanese, (lots of Portuguese base rsources available) but I'm not prepared to give it the necessary commitment. I thought about French, but I'm just not ready for it yet. The mere thought of even more verb conjugations...aaaargh...not just yet. I even thought about studying Galician, but, it's really just way too close to Portuguese.

So, why Haitian Creole? I'm not a doctor or healthcare worker. Nor am I a member of a NGO doing relief work or a volunteer- though volunteering may be in my future. Well, even though you can't get there from here- easily, I do live in the Caribbean. We have a small Haitian community on the island. I travel to Miami and New Orleans ccasionally and there's an even larger Haitian community there. I simply love the music and the people are very warm and friendly.

As a bonus, the other French Creoles of the region- St Lucia, Dominica, Guadeloupe and Martinique, French Guyana and Lanc Patua of Brazil are mutually intelligible to a large extent along the lines of the Scandinavian languages. Judging from what I've seen, it shouldn't be to difficult to make the adjustment when needed. Wyclef Jean B-World Connection video “This clip is from “B-World Connection”, a very popular television show diffused throughout the Francophone World. Guadeloupean host of the show, Brother Jimmy, travels to New York to meet with and interview Haitian/American artist Wyclef-Jean. What is interesting about this interaction is that they are both speaking their own national Creoles to each other (with French subtitles).

Amazingly enough, there are actually quite a lot of materials available to learn the language.

Free resources:

DLI Haitian Creole has poor, and for several lessons totally inaudible, audio but wonderfully thorough texts.
Pimsleur- I downloaded the first 10 lessons when they were offering it for free after the 2010 earthquake.
Center for Applied Linguistics phrasebook for refugees
2 bilingual dictionaries from Eric- before the download freeze. One of the dictionaries is a picture dictionary.
Audio book- “Chita pa bay” with pdf text for L/R and comprehension questions.
“Wayne Drop” (play on words for “Rain Drop”) a 16 page pdf in both English and Kreyòl intended for 5th graders that teaches all about the voyage of a drop of water (yon ti gout dlo) in the Everglades in the first person (does this count as one of Serpent's first person biographies?). I've already made the bilingual text. Wayne Drop Creole pdf and Wayne Drop EnglishThe Bible (Bib-la) in Haitian Creole and the audio for the New Testament- recently translated in 1999. I also have it in the bilingual version with English. I do know the book fairly well.
An Pale Kreyòl course1988 pdf with audio
Ti Koze Kreyòl (conversational) pdf with audio

In addition I actually bought:
a real textbook with 3 hours of audio called Pawol lakay- Haitian Creole Language and Culture for Beginner and Intermediate Learners- $54US from educavision.com
Woben Lakwa- Robinson Crusoe translated, first chapter free online- from Amazon in paperback- $10US. This is another semi first person biography.
Ti Prens lan- The Little Prince translated- from educavision.com $10US without audio-none available.

Benjamin Hebblethwaite, a professor of Haitian Creole at the University of Florida, has translated and transcribed video interviews of "Houngans"- voudou priests with bilingual texts available from the DLOC- Digital Library of the Caribbean.

This ought to hold me for a while.

Haitian Creole has no verb conjugations- using particles to indicate tense. The pronunciation is much simpler in comparison to French. Words have minimal to mostly no gender structure. Plurals are simply formed. A pleasant surprise has been discovering that the structure of the language has much in common with the way the local version of Caribbean English is structured, it just has French vocabulary instead of English.

I will also be meeting a Haitian friend once a week for practice speaking.

My goals are to reach a B-1 equivalent and be conversational. I plan on spending about an hour a day with the language most days. I am looking forward to see how well I get on with it. At this point, I don't know if it will hold my interest in the same way as Spanish and Portuguese- literature, while extant, is sparse. The great Haitian writer, Jaques Roumain, wrote mostly in French. So it remains to be seen. Also, it's my first attempt at a log. I hope I can make it enjoyable reading for those who may be interested. Any and all advice is welcome! Ann ale!

Edited by iguanamon on 28 December 2012 at 4:24am7 persons have voted this message useful

Good luck! I'm really looking forward to see how far you can get. There are plenty of Haitians at my University and they all seem so happy speaking! It's a happy language :)
1 person has voted this message useful

Awesome choice of language!
Make sure you get a lot of talking in, because in my experience learning kreyol there are
mounds and mounds of expressions which everybody knows, but no one writes down in
language books!
Kouraj, epi ban m' nouvel sou kijan kreyol ou ap pwogrese!
1 person has voted this message useful

Mèsi anpil, Leurre, ou se trè janti. I will be speaking early, and as often as I can, in person and via skype as well. I'll be following a multi-track approach in my learning- L/R, reading, speaking, listening and a course or two.

Edited by iguanamon on 18 November 2013 at 1:24pm1 person has voted this message useful

So, I'm breaking into creole with Pimsleur, Ti Koze Kreyòl and Chita Pa Bay, Pawòl Lakay and Wayne Drop. I'm up to lesson 10 in Pimsleur. I'm just getting past the creepy "invitation to a drink" phase. Wouldn't Pimsleur be a lot better if they dropped that stuff, added more prompts in the TL and a new focus on the needs of people "other than businessmen". Still I do find it very useful for pronunciation and automaticity in speech.

I'll be meeting with my Haitian friend for lunch next week, so I am concentrating on being able to have a small conversation, greetings, how are you, what would you like to drink- ha, ha! Should be a lot of fun!

The free resources, Ti Koze Kreyòl, Chita Pa Bay and Wayne Drop, I access via my HP Touchpad tablet. If you don't like the free resources because of the hassle of printing and binding, you should definitely try a tablet. I can recline on the sofa with my headphones on, my feet up and studying with ease. The tablet has been a godsend.

Getting back to Ti Koze Kreyòl and Chita Pa Bay, the first is a conversational course- boy meets girl at Haitian Creole class in 19 lessons. There's no bilingual translation of the conversation, so I have to make my own which is helping me to understand the words. The pdf has a vocab section with each word translated. After the conversations, there are explanatory notes and the next page has comprehension questions. At the end of the 19 lessons there are 10 "Do it yourself" conversations which will be quite handy for native speaker interaction in person and via skype- Ann ale!

Chita Pa Bay- loosely translated as "sitting around doesn't do any good", is an abridged Kreyòl translation of Jacques Roumain's Haitian novel (written in French -English translation by Langston Hughes) Gouverneurs de la rosée with notes, questions and audio but no English translation. I'm taking my own advice (from Mark Burnett) "jump in and swim even if you don't know how". I also have the Bible, translated in 1990 in bilingual Portuguese and Kreyòl text with audio for later.

There certainly is no shortage of resources available, even if there is no Assimil course (they do have one for Guadeloupe Kréyòl and a "De poche" for Haitian).

I am also continuing to try to improve my Portuguese and Spanish. I enjoy their respective literature and films, which are extensive and inexhaustible. Unfortunately, Haitian Creole can't compete in this realm, at least not yet. The reasons are more than just poverty, which we'll get into later.

As I have stated earlier, one of the things that I like about learning languages, besides interacting with native speakers is good literature and good films. Both are sparse in Haitian Creole. Poverty is a big reason. There are also reasons other than poverty for the dearth of literature and good films in Haitian Creole. Haiti has a population of about 10 million and a literacy rate of about 53% Education in Haiti- Wikipedia. According to the UNDP, Haiti ranks 158 out of 187 countries on the poverty index. The current linguistic situation on the ground in the country plays one role out of many in perpetuating the problem, in my opinion.

Education in Haiti is primarily conducted in French, which is an official language of the country. According to most measures, only 5% of the population of about 10 million speak French fluently- 100% speak Creole. Expecting children to study science and mathematics in a language they don't speak and which even their own teachers have an imperfect grasp, is crazy.

...MD: My work showed me that the idea that Haitian Creole is 'primitive' is empirically untrue and, moreover, politically motivated. Haiti was colonized by the French, and language there has always been used as a means to concentrate power in the hands of the few to the detriment of the many.

To this day, the vast majority of Haitians are born in communities where they're exposed to only Haitian Creole, which is the language that they'll spend their entire lives speaking. Even though Creole is now officially the national language and one of the two official languages (with French), French is still the primary language of instruction, of exams, of administration, of the justice system and so on. As a result, the only children who can succeed are those born into a certain amount of privilege and in families where French is spoken or that can afford the few good schools.

The rest of the kids by and large are being handicapped from the very first years of school because they're being taught to read and write and do math and science in a language that's foreign to them. This prevents them from flourishing because they're constantly struggling to overcome this language barrier. For most of these kids, 'education' becomes a struggle to learn some ineffective approximation of French, and the opportunity to actually learn contents outside of French is reduced to almost zero. Because of this linguistic barrier, the best they can do is to memorize with little understanding textbooks, formulas, problem sets and so on, with the hope that they can recite their answers at the State's official exams, most of which are in French...

This goes all the way back to the history of Haiti as a French colony in the 17th and 18th centuries. And even after we got rid of the French in 1803, an elite class of Haitians rose to take the colonizers' place. Language is one of the means that wealthy Haitians have used to exclude the impoverished majority of the people - the moun an deyò, as they're known in Creole, or 'people on the outside the towns.' And the moun an deyò are by and large kept outside any opportunity for socio-economic development.

It is this exclusion that's the greatest challenge Haitian schools face, and to overcome it they need to open up resources for a much greater number of students. In order to accomplish that, it will be necessary to use Haitian Creole as a building block so that academic materials can be, in principle, accessible to students from all over Haiti in the only language that they all speak. Haitian Creole is thus an indispensable linguistic tool for quality education to become accessible to all Haitians, not just the wealthy and those who can speak French.

Jared Diamond, an American author and lecturer, wrote in his book Collapse about the disparity between the two next door island neighbors of Haiti and the Dominican Republic summary. As with most situations in the world, problems can be very complex, indeed.

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